butter v soft margarine

The lidl and aldi soft butters(beautiful buttery/heavenly buttery) are every bit as good if not better than the soft stork for baking.I use them all the time now for baking-very light and fluffy textured cakes.

i swap directly -weight for weight- but the end result is slightly different for obvious reasons, margarine has more water than butter, butter has more fat. Sometimes i find if i've swapped directly the end result is as someone else said slightly denser (sinks a little). I also can find it at times too fatty tasting.Stork only has 59g fat, flora buttery 70g and butter 81g fat. I like the compromise of using half and half. I vary which fat i use for baking, don't have any one i always go for, really depends on what i'm making and what the recipe says.

The advantage the soft margarine has is that it is soft straight from the fridge and butter is not, so you'd need to soften your butter first if you were going to cream it with sugar.I think that you could use the 'soft butters' that exist these days as well in baking.

I'm making a Mary Berry Christmas cake recipe and have just noticed she calls for soft margarine and not butter. Does butter/margarine weight translate directly? e.g- if she calls for 225g of soft margarine, will the equivalent of butter do?

I have a dim and distant memory of hearing her say she often uses margarine in her cakes rather than butter, but I do like the flavour of butter and in any case have already bought it in.